Like many of us, you may have run into challenges when importing real-time market data in Excel, Visual Studio & SQL Server. With the recent addition of Xignite Financial Market Data to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace Datamarket, users can now pull live stock quotes directly into Microsoft Excel 2010, develop data rich applications using Visual Studio 2010 and seamlessly populate backend database with SQL Server 2010.

In late 2010, Xignite and Microsoft teamed up to make XigniteBATSLastSale, a real-time stock quote data service, available through the Azure Marketplace Datamarket, with the addition of other datasets scheduled to rollout in the months ahead. With this, Microsoft users can obtain instant online access to real-time stock quotes from the BATS Exchange. Now everyone from hardcore mobile app developers to garage based startups can obtain access to the same professional grade APIs to power their applications.

New to Xignite is the addition of OData, or Open Data Protocol, a method of querying and updating data which unlocks the data from the silos that exist in legacy applications. Today, OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

Wes Yanaga with Microsoft’s Channel 9 sat down with Shoshanna Budzianowski (SQL Azure) and Chas Cooper (Xignite) to get the low down on what this partnership is all about, and how it will benefit end user around the globe.

After the Channel 9 video was completed, Shoshanna Budzianowski sat down with Marc Bollinger, Web Service Engineer at Xignite, for some one-on-one developer talk and a bit of programming fun (CLICK MORE to see developer video)

Looking forward, Xignite has plans to put the vast majority its data onto the Azure DataMarket. “We have started with our most popular data sets, but will continue to add data until the market is satisfied with what Xignite is offering” said Chas Cooper, VP of Product management at Xignite.

Microsoft brings a very horizontal market to Xignite, with DataMarket providing broad coverage across different verticals. When Microsoft looked for companies to work with on Data Market, two things attracted Microsoft to Xignite; 1) the fact that Xignite understands how to deliver on-demand market data and financial web services” and 2) out of all the financial data providers evaluated for Azure Datamarket, Xignite has the most reasonable, rational terms of use across its data sets. Xignite also uses standards such as SOAP, REST & JSON to make integrate with Xignite’s web services simple and straight forward.